Remembering The Old Songs:

SWANNANOA TUNNEL

by Lyle Lofgren

(Originally published: Inside Bluegrass, January 2006)

Here's a useful term you might not know:
mondegreen. A mondegreen is a word or phrase that you hear but
misconstrue into a completely different and peculiar meaning. An
example is Jimi Hendrix's psychedelic...excuse me while I kiss the sky
mis-heard as the homoerotic ...kiss this guy.

Another famous one is from
the gospel song, There's A Light Lit Up in Galilee: the
consecrated
cross-eyed bear.

"Mondegreen" was coined by a writer named Sylvia
Wright, in a 1954 Harper's article. She explained that, as a child, she
loved to hear The Bonny Earl of Murray (Child #181) because of
the
romantic verse:

Ye Highlands and ye Lawlands,
Oh where have ye been?
They have slayed the Earl of Murray
And the Lady Mondegreen.

It was only after she grew up that she
realized the last line is And they laid him on the green.

Cecil Sharp (1859-1924) was an
Englishman who became interested in Morris Dancing, then in folk music.
He decided to collect American versions of British folksongs, and came
to America with a younger protege, Maud Karpeles (1885-1976). Although
the resulting book was titled English Folk Songs from the Southern
Appalachians, it included some, such as this one, that originated
in
America.

Sharp and Karpeles collected Swannanoa
Tunnel in North Carolina in 1916, and the mondegreen problem is
especially severe if you can only hear a song once. Without a recording
machine, they had to transcribe the words and tunes while people were
singing them, and the North Carolina accents misled them badly on this
song: "Tunnel" became "town-o" and "hoot owl" was transcribed as
"hoodow."

The song is a variant of the
tunnel-oriented work song usually known as "Nine Pound Hammer." We
don't know where it might have originated, as the song is widespread in
the south, even in Mississippi where there are few tunnels. This
version, from North Carolina, is at least localized and datable:
Western North Carolina Railroad's Swannanoa Tunnel was the longest
(1800 feet) of 7 hand-dug tunnels through the Blue Ridge mountains to
Asheville. The project, completed in 1879, took 20 years and cost at
least 300 lives.

Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882-1973), an
Asheville attorney and banjo-picker, knew the song, and, many years
after Sharp and Karpeles, sang it clearly for a recording (reissued on
Smithsonian-Folkways CD 40082). The liner notes even transcribe the
words (a rarity these days). We're publishing them here as a public
service to save American Studies academics the trouble of searching for
hoodow myths and motifs.